ThoughtBlip

I’m sure this has been thought of before, or at least wished for before… but imagine if you were able to simply plug your old spare computers together on a network and configure them to join a group of other computers… as a part of the whole… (I’m stealing the “Borg” name from StarTrek for now because of the “assimilation” factor).

Users of the “virtual” computer would not need to know or care when computers are added or removed from the Borg…all they would see is more HD space and an impact to performance.

 In a simple scenario, I can imagine the following:

1. installing a “Borg” on one computer with an identity. 
2. booting, say, a spare old laptop with, say, a bootstrap CD that will simply get the laptop up and running, and ask which Borg to connect to.
3. once connected to the Borg, the laptop is assimilated.

You wouldn’t have to interact directly with any of the hardware or peripherals - you’d just connect from another computer via a remote server display… or via another Borg.  File systems would automatically be merged into logical space, and mirrored.. the Borg would be fault tolerant once enough hardware was added so that if any single machine failed, it would be able to recover by shuffling information around from the parity or redundant data storage….

A system like this on current hardware without a large hardware base would be very slow given all the above overhead… but I can imagine the system being able to grow in power as hardware is added and removed, and processing is distributed among the hardware in the Borg… and much like TCP/IP where there can be redundant routing paths for reliability, there could be redundant processing requests so that computational failures and network outages don’t impact performance as one would initially assume…

The Borg itself would not be centralized - it would have to be a virtual system that is distributed, amorphous, constantly changing as people plug their systems into the Borg, and take them away…. It could even be possible to donate part of your system to the Borg, like with the search for extra terrestrial life….or all of the system to the Borg… When you are ready to remove your computer from the Borg, the Borg could even reinstall and configure an OS for you, or restore a backup… essentially allowing you to plug in, donate HW, restore to a previous state, and then unplug.

 Just a thought…

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 27th, 2007 at 2:52 am and is filed under future, speculation, technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.